Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a degenerative brain disorder characterized clinically by progressive loss of memory, cognition, reasoning, judgment and emotional stability that gradually leads to profound mental deterioration and ultimately death. AD is a very common cause of progressive mental failure (dementia) in aged humans and is believed to represent the fourth most common medical cause of death in the United States. AD has been observed in ethnic groups worldwide and presents a major present and future public health problem.
The brains of individuals with AD exhibit characteristic lesions termed senile (or amyloid) plaques, amyloid angiopathy (amyloid deposits in blood vessels) and neurofibrillary tangles. Large numbers of these lesions, particularly amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles of paired helical filaments, are generally found in several areas of the human brain important for memory and cognitive function in patients with AD.
The main protein component of the neurofibrillary degeneration in AD and several other neurodegenerative diseases is a hyperphosphorylated form of the microtubule associated protein tau. Developing therapeutics preventing or clearing tau aggregation has been of interest for many years but candidate drugs, including anti-aggregation compounds and kinase inhibitors, have only just entered in clinical testing (Brunden, et al. Nat Rev Drug Discov 8:783-93, 2009)
Recently, preclinical evidence has been produced in transgenic tau mouse models that active and passive immunization for tau can have therapeutic potential (Chai, et al. J Biol Chem 286:34457-67, 2011, Boutajangout, et al. J Neurochem 118:658-67, 2011, Boutajangout, et al. J Neurosci 30:16559-66, 2010, Asuni, et al. J Neurosci 27:9115-29, 2007). A tauopathy transmission and spreading hypothesis has recently been described and is based on the Braak stages of tauopathy progression in human brain and tauopathy spreading after tau aggregate injections in preclinical tau models (Frost et al. J Biol Chem 284:12845-52, 2009, Clavaguera, et al. Nat Cell Biol 11:909-13, 2009). Thus, there is a need for therapeutics to prevent tau aggregation and tauopathy progression to treat AD and other neurodegenerative diseases.